Complexity in Complexity: Understanding Visual Complexity Through Structure, Color, and Surprise

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sarıtaş, Karahan, Dayan, Peter, Shen, Tingke, Nath, Surabhi S
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Sarıtaş, Karahan
Dayan, Peter
Shen, Tingke
Nath, Surabhi S
author_facet Sarıtaş, Karahan
Dayan, Peter
Shen, Tingke
Nath, Surabhi S
contents Understanding how humans perceive visual complexity is a key area of study in visual cognition. Previous approaches to modeling visual complexity assessments have often resulted in intricate, difficult-to-interpret algorithms that employ numerous features or sophisticated deep learning architectures. While these complex models achieve high performance on specific datasets, they often sacrifice interpretability, making it challenging to understand the factors driving human perception of complexity. Recently (Shen, et al. 2024) proposed an interpretable segmentation-based model that accurately predicted complexity across various datasets, supporting the idea that complexity can be explained simply. In this work, we investigate the failure of their model to capture structural, color and surprisal contributions to complexity. To this end, we propose Multi-Scale Sobel Gradient (MSG) which measures spatial intensity variations, Multi-Scale Unique Color (MUC) which quantifies colorfulness across multiple scales, and surprise scores generated using a Large Language Model. We test our features on existing benchmarks and a novel dataset (Surprising Visual Genome) containing surprising images from Visual Genome. Our experiments demonstrate that modeling complexity accurately is not as simple as previously thought, requiring additional perceptual and semantic factors to address dataset biases. Our model improves predictive performance while maintaining interpretability, offering deeper insights into how visual complexity is perceived and assessed. Our code, analysis and data are available at https://github.com/Complexity-Project/Complexity-in-Complexity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_15890
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Complexity in Complexity: Understanding Visual Complexity Through Structure, Color, and Surprise
Sarıtaş, Karahan
Dayan, Peter
Shen, Tingke
Nath, Surabhi S
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Understanding how humans perceive visual complexity is a key area of study in visual cognition. Previous approaches to modeling visual complexity assessments have often resulted in intricate, difficult-to-interpret algorithms that employ numerous features or sophisticated deep learning architectures. While these complex models achieve high performance on specific datasets, they often sacrifice interpretability, making it challenging to understand the factors driving human perception of complexity. Recently (Shen, et al. 2024) proposed an interpretable segmentation-based model that accurately predicted complexity across various datasets, supporting the idea that complexity can be explained simply. In this work, we investigate the failure of their model to capture structural, color and surprisal contributions to complexity. To this end, we propose Multi-Scale Sobel Gradient (MSG) which measures spatial intensity variations, Multi-Scale Unique Color (MUC) which quantifies colorfulness across multiple scales, and surprise scores generated using a Large Language Model. We test our features on existing benchmarks and a novel dataset (Surprising Visual Genome) containing surprising images from Visual Genome. Our experiments demonstrate that modeling complexity accurately is not as simple as previously thought, requiring additional perceptual and semantic factors to address dataset biases. Our model improves predictive performance while maintaining interpretability, offering deeper insights into how visual complexity is perceived and assessed. Our code, analysis and data are available at https://github.com/Complexity-Project/Complexity-in-Complexity.
title Complexity in Complexity: Understanding Visual Complexity Through Structure, Color, and Surprise
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15890